An SDN-Coordinated Steering Framework for Multipath Big Data Transfer Application

Abstract

Data Transmission is a primary mechanism that can affect the performance of distributed storage systems. The traditional single-path transmission protocols are not efficient to serve several requirements of big data applications. In this paper, we propose an SDN-coordinated steering framework for multipath big data transfer applications. Multipath TCP protocol (MPTCP) coupled with SDN are mainly used for big data transfer in our framework. This framework is useful and cost-effective for OpenFlow networks and overlay networks. To provide a practical multipath transmission scheme for big data transfer applications using MPTCP, we propose a novel OpenFlow-Stats routing algorithm. In our algorithm, a new topology-pruning technique is applied, and the transmission paths are selected based on switch-port statistics. Our proposed framework is implemented and evaluated using the Mininet emulator and ONOS controller. The results show that our routing scheme can reduce the completion time of big data transfer up to 90% compared with the traditional routing with disjoint paths and up to 35% compared with the previous work. Moreover, our proposed routing is more scalable than other previous works in that it can provide lower complexity and system overhead. The results show that our routing scheme produces 57% less overhead compared with the previous work.